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Step back, I know Trados API

The year is 2007. memoQ is in its infancy; Trados rules the LSP world. At that time, one of espell’s biggest localization partners cranked up the volume, and started to localize their software products and related documentation into 42 languages with high-frequency updates. As a result, we had to deal with copious amount of files, robust version control and maintaining 42 translation memories. Every time a new project arrived, the project manager had to empty the bitter cup and open every single TM by hand, do an analysis on the prepared files and export the results for each. After having wrapped all this up, it was also necessary to copy the results into an Excel file with more than 42 sheets, one for each language plus the summary pages. With no automation tool available, this process took up many unnecessary hours and required manual work, which was not only tedious and unproductive, but also prone to error.

Fortunately, Trados actually had a reasonable COM API for automation, what’s more, it came with an informative and comprehensive documentation. Thus MultiAnalyze was born, specifically to solve this issue, reducing the time necessary for analyzing and quoting a project from hours to minutes. Since the API allowed direct access to Trados features in a non-convoluted manner, the actual development time payed off by orders of magnitude.

The application required that the TMs be gathered in a single folder using a consistent naming convention to indicate source and target languages. The language code database was stored in a special .csv file to provide mapping between the coding schemes used by different Trados versions and localization customers. With all the resources in place, the application not only opened each Trados TM and wrapped up the analysis, but also automatically filled in the project budget Excel sheet – that is, in addition to eliminating the strenuous manual task of associating multiple files and TMs for each language, analysis results were also inserted automatically.

While most of our clients have already been migrated to memoQ, MultiAnalyze is still in daily use after five years. In our next post, find out more about how we sped up the memoQ analysis process.